CompuServe Thread

#2.1 upgrade HD question

3 messages in this thread
#37880From: <David L. Gold>Nov 23, 1993 9:57 PM
I've (finally) put aside the spare change and purchased the full upgrade to 2.1. Upon reading the manuals however, I've become somewhat confused and have a question: With my harddrive, do I need to completely back-up all my information prior to installing the new 2.1 software (as I'm under the impression that I'll need to totally re-format the HD), or is there a way around this that I've missed? Getting ready to buy a mess-O-floppies,
#37881From: Robert LittleNov 24, 1993 12:09 AM
Jumping in… I 'think' you probably will have to re-format your hard drive as writing the new RDB with the new file system I 'think' takes more room on the drive(?). Anyway, I couldn't figure out a way to actually upgrade without re-formatting. I tried! I thought I had it once, but, really didn't as AutoPilot (indirectly) and sja (directly) pointed out. On a philosphical point, you should already have have at least 2 messes-O-floppies in the first place (and a good backup program. Some are available here on CI$). Otherwise, no matter what computer you have, you're just asking for a whole lot of heartbreak down the road. Believe me! (well, I don't really expect you to but…)
#37885From: Ronald B. RomineNov 24, 1993 1:51 AM
It depends on what version of AmigaDOS your upgrading from. If you had 2.04, and had formated the HD with FFS, then just install the 2.1 disks (overwriting old 2.04 files) with out reformating the HD. If your upgrading from 1.3, you don't need to reformat. However, under 2.x, the boot partition can now be formated with FFS. The FFS is faster than OFS, so re-formating will speedup HD reads/writes. Reformating will also de-fragment the HD partitions increasing speed.